SOURCE: "Signs of Nationalism in The History of Emily Montague; Canadians of the Old and The Imperialist: Cultural Displacement and the Semiotics of Wine," in Recherches Semiotiques-Semiotic Inquiry, Vol. 14, Nos. 1-2, 1994, pp. 235-50.

In the following excerpt, Merrett discusses the cultural and symbolic meanings associated with wine in Emily Montague.

Wine—the fermented juice of the grape—may be a natural phenomenon yet it is also the product of complex vinification processes involving traditional but disputed histories: its origin and production have always been subject to legal rules and political restrictions. Its consumption has served society in many but contentious ways: as water-purifier, as beverage, as pain-killer, as palliative drug as well as in a wide range of customary and ritual functions illustrated in the body of this article. In society, wine constitutes sets of signifiers and signifieds. Encoded in writing, these sets inform and motivate textual signification...